Wheeler Centre

In the 1960s and 1970s one figure commanded the [Australian] literary landscape, and ruled the artistic life of Sydney like an (intermittently) benign despot. Nobel Prize winner, patrician activist, host of legendary proportions, he was famed for his savagery as well as his generosity, his intolerance of fools and charlatans, his immense warmth and his uncompromising intelligence.

A couple of weeks ago, I listened to a panel discussion at the Wheeler Centre entitled “The Late Great Patrick White.” It was the first in the Centre’s series of discussions about the lives and works of Australian writers who are no longer with us. I can only hope that the others turn out to be as fulfilling as this one because it was a fantastic event: impassioned, intelligent, often very funny. Happily, there’s no need to recount the discussion in detail now that the Centre has uploaded video, but I do want to add a few general remarks on White and the event participants and to point towards what I think were some of the night’s most valuable moments. Continue reading →

My post from a couple of weeks ago left a few threads dangling which I hope now to tie up. Last weekend, that post also opened up an unexpected opportunity for me which I’ll explain in a moment. First, though, for those who wish to see for themselves the event I discussed in that post — the ‘Critical Failure’ debate on the current state of Australian literary criticism at the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas — a lightly edited video is now online at the Centre’s website. Witness the great Peter Craven in all his grotesque glory. Continue reading →

Last night, I spent some time at the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas to listen to a panel discussion about the current state of literary criticism in Australia. The discussion was part of the Centre’s ‘Critical Failure’ series of events, and, of course, the series name clearly gives away the drift of the conversation: the panellists unanimously concluded that the state of literary criticism in Australia is currently pretty dire. On the panel were the publishers Hilary McPhee and Rebecca Starford as well as the critics Peter Craven and Gideon Haigh. To some extent, the need for such a discussion was identified by Haigh earlier this year, when he published a brief but powerful opinion piece on the failure of Australian literary criticism in the upstart journal Kill Your Darlings. Continue reading →

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours at the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing, and Ideas in central Melbourne. In 2008, Melbourne become the second UNESCO City of Literature following the initial granting of that title to Edinburgh in 2004. As part of the city’s bid for the title, the Victorian state government agreed to build and fund in perpetuity a dedicated space for regular literary events in an atrium attached to the State Library. When additional funding was offered by Tony and Maureen Wheeler — they of the Lonely Planet phenomenon — the proposed space was named in their honour. The Wheeler Centre opened earlier this year and now holds daily literary events, all of them accessible to the public at no cost, as well as providing a home for six resident literary organisations: festival organisers, independent publishers, small-press journals, and so on. Yesterday the Wheeler Centre threw open its doors and gave the public unprecedented access to the entire site, including those areas that are off-limits throughout the week. I thought it seemed like a good opportunity to take a fresh look at the Centre, and, more importantly, to take a fresh look at Melbourne’s City of Literature status in general.

First, to the Wheeler Centre itself. I appreciate the sentiment behind it. The construction of such a dedicated literary space and the hosting of free daily literary events can only be a good thing. Still, I have some reservations about the way those events are run. Since the Wheeler Centre is self-professedly “the centrepiece of the Victorian Government’s City of Literature initiative,” one would hope that the events held at the Centre are essentially and recognisably literary in nature. The fact is, they’re not. The Wheeler Centre’s full title is the giveaway: it is, as above, the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing, and Ideas, and, with the inclusion of the word “ideas,” the Centre gives itself a free pass to downgrade the literariness of its events. The “ideas” on view at the Centre are the sorts of ideas that attract immediate public interest insofar as they are “ripped from the headlines.” Domestic politics, environmental initiatives, international affairs, and so on: these “ideas” dominate the program at the Centre and thus sideline the discussion of literature that is, by nature, of less immediate interest because it makes a bid for long-term value. Not only that, but even when such literature does receive attention at the Centre, it is largely approached as little more than a vehicle for “ideas” and evaluated according to its ability to offer a distinctly human response to various social and political dilemmas. In short, the Wheeler Centre tends to look upon literature as either explicitly polemical non-fiction or as a polemic with the aesthetic veil of fiction cast over it, rather than as a product of laborious and sophisticated artistry. So the value of literature is found in its ability to “say something” about the world we inhabit and about “what it means to be human.” I would sacrifice my firstborn to be able to go there and hear someone discuss literature as literature.

This wouldn’t be such a disappointment, of course, if the Wheeler Centre did not so completely dominate the City of Literature initiative. Although it is referred to as the “centrepiece” of the initiative, it is in effect the totality of that initiative and, as a result, there is a dearth of literariness to be found elsewhere in this City of Literature. And this, in turn, wouldn’t be so disappointing if Edinburgh did not already provide such a stunning example of how to both invest the quality of literariness in a City of Literature and bring out the literariness already extant. On this point, I confess to a bias: I spent about four years living in Edinburgh before I moved to Melbourne in early 2009; I relocated from the inaugural City of Literature to its immediate successor. And I confess to a second bias: I have little love for the city of Melbourne because my heart remains very firmly in Edinburgh. Of course, Melbourne simply cannot compete with Edinburgh in the literary stakes. Edinburgh has hundreds of years of literary history behind it, whereas Melbourne wasn’t even founded until 1835 and didn’t become a city until more than a decade after that. Nevertheless, Melbourne has put little effort into making itself a City of Literature by bringing literature into public spaces so that the very streets are suffused with it. It could learn a lot from Edinburgh’s efforts to locate its literary history at street level so that literature appears before your very eyes no matter where you look.

Holyrood Park, at the base of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, is home to Arthur’s Seat, a great volcanic peak surrounded by acres of heath, knolls, lochs, and crags. It gave Arthur Conan Doyle the inspiration for the setting of The Lost World, and was used by James Hogg as the setting for his hero’s eerie encounter with his doppelganger in Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Robert Louis Stevenson lived in Edinburgh and set large parts of Kidnapped in and around the city as well as obviously drawing on many of the city’s characteristics to give his London a gothic twist in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. John Buchan immortalised the city in The Thirty-Nine Steps. Ian Fleming found a home for the young James Bond at Edinburgh’s Fettes College. Muriel Spark, Alasdair Gray, and James Kelman have each co-opted parts of the city in their work — and, of course, in doing so they place themselves in a tradition that dates back two centuries to the pinnacle of Scottish romanticism under Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns, both of whom made the city distinctly their own in the literature they wrote in it and about it.

Shall I go on? J.M. Barrie lived in Edinburgh and wrote the early drafts of Peter Pan there. Charles Darwin was a student at Edinburgh University; I used to pass his old lodgings on my way to work each day. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell visited the city a number of times, with Boswell writing of their adventures around Edinburgh in his work on the life of Johnson. The poet Robert Fergusson lived and worked in Edinburgh. Kenneth Grahame wrote The Wind in the Willows whilst living and working in Edinburgh. The two great poets of World War I, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, met in the Military Hospital at Craiglockhart in the suburbs of Edinburgh. It was on a visit to Edinburgh that Mary Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein. Three of the greatest philosophers the world has ever known — David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill — all lived and wrote their masterpieces in Edinburgh and its surrounds, and Hume and Smith are both buried in Edinburgh and honoured with commemorative statues on the Royal Mile. Thomas Carlyle was right there in Edinburgh alongside those philosophers. Lewis Crassic Gibbon followed. Hell, Chris Claremont even set a couple of issues of The Uncanny X-Men at the top of the Holyrood Crags. More recently, Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro both lived as students in Edinburgh and continue to return there almost every year, even taking the city as the subject of their fictions. Almost all of the locales and authors I have named so far are mentioned on a plaque or a monument somewhere in Edinburgh to give them due credit for their place in world literature. Additionally, the Royal Mile is dotted with literary institutions: the Scottish Storytelling Centre, the Scottish Poetry Centre, the Scottish Book Trust, and the Writers’ Museum. The National Library of Scotland is just around the corner on George IV Bridge. Step off the Royal Mile into Lady Stair’s Close and you’ll find Makars’ Court, where poetry is etched into the stone slabs on the ground. Even when buildings around the city are due to undergo renovations or reconstruction, the giant tarpaulins that shroud the buildings to keep the construction site out of public view are covered from top to bottom in poetry. The last one I saw was just off the intersection of South St. David Street and Princes Street — a stone’s throw from the foreboding Sir Walter Scott Monument at the edge of the Princes Street Gardens, just opposite Waverley Station: a central train station named after a work of literature. The city is positively ablaze with traces of the written word.

And that’s just off the top of my head. The city council’s own promotional material lays out an even more distinguished literary history. Blackwood’s Magazine, the first publication ever to print the work of George Eliot, was established and published in Edinburgh. John Murray Publishers brought Lord Byron and Jane Austen into print with offices based in Edinburgh. The Edinburgh Review, which featured Thomas Carlyle and Sir Walter Scott as contributors, was one of the most widely-circulated periodicals in the British Empire: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were both among its longstanding admirers. Even Edinburgh’s social and political history obtains a literary quality within the space of the city itself as an overabundance of historical sites are accompanied by narrative explanations of their significance that dominate the city’s public spaces. Tales of plague and war and witch-burnings are told and re-told on the walls of the buildings near which such events occurred, even though those buildings that are today nothing more illustrious than pubs, cafes, shops, or other small businesses. Every site of significance is given its due in the form of a story made visible in the public arena, from the arrival place of Oliver Cromwell to the city lodgements of John Knox — to say nothing of the locales associated with Robert the Bruce, William Wallace, Bonny Prince Charlie, and on and on and on. Beyond the broad strokes of its literary history, Edinburgh is alive with small-scale literature as story after story after story adorns every possible surface of the city. And that is to say nothing of the contemporary authors whose work makes Edinburgh a renowned city today: Ian Rankin, Alexander McCall Smith, Kate Atkinson, Irvine Welsh, and J.K. Rowling. All of them have at some stage lived and worked in Edinburgh, most of them continue to do so, and collectively they have written about the city at such extraordinary length that the city as it exists in reality and the city as it exists on the page have long since become inextricably bound up with one another. As well as being unable to walk the streets of Edinburgh without spotting here and there some artefact of literary history, history itself is transformed into literature on the city streets while the city continues to inspire fresh literature today.

As I said above, I know that Melbourne is simply unable to compete with Edinburgh. To be sure, it has seen its share of literary luminaries in the past. Henry Handel Richardson, Marcus Clarke, Barbara Baynton, Neville Shute, Joseph Furphy, and Joan Lindsay all lived and wrote in or around Melbourne, and all of them produced work that has since either obtained classic status or is on its way to doing so. Someday, the work of Christos Tsiolkas, Peter Carey, and Helen Garner will probably also do the same. Brian Castro and Gerald Murnane are two of only three world-class novelists currently at work in Australia and both have written some of their work in and about Melbourne — although Castro has recently relocated to Adelaide where he now works alongside J.M. Coetzee, the third of those three world-class novelists. But beyond those authors, the leading lights of Australian literature are more evenly distributed throughout the country. Tasmania claims Christopher Koch and Richard Flanagan; the Northern Territory claims Xavier Herbert; Western Australia claims Tim Winton, Elizabeth Jolley, Randolph Stowe, and Katharine Susannah Prichard; Queensland claims David Malouf; and New South Wales claims, impressively, Patrick White, Thea Astley, Kate Grenville, Henry Lawson, Christina Stead, Thomas Keneally, and Delia Falconer. That’s about it — but, at the same time, it’s enough to work with. How about some way of identifying landmarks and locations around the city that have been incorporated into the literature of some of these writers? How about some way of identifying locations that have been marked by the personal presence of these writers? And if that’s not enough, why not turn to those writers who at some stage visited Melbourne and remarked upon it? Mark Twain lectured in this city. So did Anthony Trollope. So did Rudyard Kipling. So did Joseph Conrad. So did Arthur Conan Doyle, an Edinburgh native. Robert Louis Stevenson never visited but certainly expressed some strong opinions on Melbourne. How about a commemorative statue or two? At the moment, Melbourne features only three statues of a literary nature: an Australianised Peter Pan at Melbourne Zoo, a statue of Adam Lindsay Gordon outside the State Parliament, and — irony of ironies — a statue of Robert Burns in the Treasury Gardens. It also features a single, solitary brick taken from the boyhood home of James Joyce and placed on the periphery of the State Library, but let’s be honest here: the elevation of a brick to the status of a literary landmark couldn’t even be described as a mediocre effort without giving it undue credit. And even if we set aside these sorts of literary landmarks, why can Melbourne not follow Edinburgh’s lead in developing programs that define the reading of literature as a social act and encourage reading in the public arena? Each year, Edinburgh runs the “One Book — One Edinburgh” program, an enormous citywide initiative which aims to have everyone in the city reading the same book at the same time after having picked it up for free in any one of a number public spaces that serve as impromptu distributors. Is Melbourne unable to follow suit or is it simply unwilling? Either way, something more is needed to make this UNESCO City of Literature an essentially and identifiably literary city. The fancy title and the Wheeler Centre alone just do not suffice.

This is, of course, a futile plea. The Wheeler Centre’s promotional material states the matter very bluntly: “Our City of Literature status is not about Dickens on the tram, Nabokov in the Great Southern Strand or a Bronte or two over breakfast. It’s a recognition and celebration of Melbourne’s passionate readers.” But the act of reading involves opening oneself to the reading experience even when one is not staring at the words on the page, when one is going about one’s daily affairs. To take reading seriously involves thinking throughout the day about the books that one has previously read, as well as entertaining a curiosity about the books that one has not yet been enticed to read. More recognition of Melbourne’s literary history in the city’s public places would not only call to mind the various reading experiences of those who recognise city landmarks from where they have encountered them in literature, but would also stimulate the curiosity of those who have not read such literature and would increase the likelihood of their reading it. A citywide reading initiative would do likewise. This is the Edinburgh strategy: saturate the city with an overabundance of literary aides-mémoire in a way that makes literature an absolutely integral part of everyday life. The Melbourne strategy, at present, involves confining literary events to a fixed and dedicated space and refusing to let literature itself penetrate those four walls. Within a certain set of parameters, I admit: the intellectual life of Melbourne is surely more vigorous for the establishment of the Wheeler Centre. But insofar as the Centre has dominated of the City of Literature initiative, it has also to some extent kept the facilitation of literary discussion cordoned-off from the outside world. In Edinburgh, literature has air of vitality about it because you find it everywhere you go, in everything you encounter. In Melbourne, it feels much less vital and therefore like a mere indulgence because you have to go to a very specific location, at a very specific time, in order to encounter it — and even then, of course, you’re more likely to encounter “ideas” instead.